Homosexuality Should Be Punished by Exile or the Death Penalty
In other words, the Bible requires the suppression of homosexual vice, with the tools for such restriction including the possibility of the death penalty, but also allowing for banishment.
In Douglas Wilson’s own words: 6 quotes from 1999 to 2026, from Fidelity: What It Means to Be a One-Woman Man, Making Sense with Sam Harris and NPR, each cited to the source.
In other words, the Bible requires the suppression of homosexual vice, with the tools for such restriction including the possibility of the death penalty, but also allowing for banishment. Death is not necessarily an unjust punishment, but lawful punishments shy of that are certainly endorsed by Scripture as well.
Actually, this is the case for homosexual and adultery—heterosexual sin and adultery both. The capital offenses in the Old Testament, many people take them as minimum penalties... I take them as maximum penalties... [Sam Harris: “Are you open-minded with respect to the sanction of capital punishment in response to homosexuality and adultery? There are cases in which you think the maximum biblical sanction could be and should be applied?”] Correct. There are—I could envision a circumstance where that could happen. Capital punishment could be applied without injustice... One of my baseline convictions is I’m not going to apologize for any sanction that’s clearly in the Bible... When there was a man who was executed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, I’m not going to apologize for that. That was holy, righteous, and good. When someone was executed for the various offenses you mentioned back then, that was holy, righteous, and good.
King Asa in Israel and King Jehoshaphat both, in modern parlance, closed the bathhouses, they shut it down, and they exiled the homosexuals, and they didn’t execute them. And so my argument was execution is not the minimum penalty in the Old Testament; it’s the maximum penalty. It’s not a minimum ‘you must do this in all circumstances.’ So I was arguing for the civil magistrate having the leeway to deal with the social problem of public sodomy and the pride parades and whatnot.
[Pamela Brown: “Would you endorse punishing someone who is gay in the America you want to be living in?”] This brings up another old controversy. King Asa in Israel and King Jehoshaphat both, in modern parlance, they both closed the bathhouses, they shut it down, and they exiled. They said, all done with that, and exiling homosexuals. And the Scripture praises both men for doing that, which means that the requirement for the death penalty that does exist in Leviticus, that requirement was not a minimum penalty, but was a maximum penalty, because Scripture praises the kings who didn’t execute the homosexuals; they just shut the orgy down. They just shut the party down. So there is latitude in the application of biblical law.
In that debate back then, I pointed out that King Asa and King Jehoshaphat in the Old Testament closed the bathhouses, and they exiled the sodomites from the land. And their behavior is praised in the text. That told me that execution, although a lawful penalty for homosexual behavior, was not the minimum penalty; it was the maximum penalty. [Spencer Macnaughton: "And do you believe that still, that in your eyes the maximum penalty for homosexual behavior in an ideal world, in Pastor Wilson's ideal world, would be execution?"] Yeah. [SM: "You do?"] Yeah, if you ask me: "Could you ever envision a homosexual crime of any nature being visited with the death penalty?" Yes, I could.
Modern Christians are finding themselves increasingly surrounded by a sodomite culture. […] Whether we are considering the problem of sodomy on a personal level, or on a civil level, we will not come to sexual wisdom until we come to realize that God hates all homosexual practice, and that the fear of the Lord is to hate what He hates. Compassion for the sodomite, and a willingness to present the gospel to him, is not inconsistent with a true hatred for the perversion.